Shera Avi-Yonah

speaker

197 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 13 Aug

Shera Avi-Yonah’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.

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The Intelligence from The Economist · Kicking and screaming: protests at World Cup · 11 Jun 2026 podcast

The legal regime of space law doesn't really envision real commercial activity that is not directly tied to a launch on Earth.

And right now, also under that regime, space is the province of mankind.

It's not divided up into American space space, if you think of the analogy to airspace or Russian space-space or anything like that.

And so this raises a lot of difficult questions for.

for governments that want to tax space activity, but don't really necessarily know how that might be achieved.

Not yet.

So for example, in the 70s, several countries that sit on the equator.

Claimed, well, satellites that orbit around the equator are actually in our airspace, if you think about it.

And countries like Russia and China have also said tentatively in various laws, well, maybe we might want to do this at some point, but no one has really made that kind of first attempt to say this activity in space is taxable by my country.

And part of that is that we're on the cusp, but not quite there yet.

In terms of the actual commercial activity.

So lots of companies have announced plans, but they haven't carried those to fruition to the point where it would really bring this question to the fore.

So for example,

When we have at some point private space stations, which are currently being planned, and two citizens of two different countries go onto that private space station, neither of them are citizens of the country which launched the private space station and they start a retail business up in the heavens.

Who gets to tax that activity?

Is there going to be a a VAT on space sales?

Not to mention that if we really do have life on Mars, as Elon mentioned.

Musk imagines, you can think about real economic activity and people staying up in space for more than half the year and losing their tax residency on Earth.

So it it raises a lot of interesting questions that are academic right now, but very soon they won't be.

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